Virtual Virgin Page 0,27
Quicksilver had attacked, but it was a half-werewolf Cesar Cicereau whose repeated, growling lunges drove the beast off its stride and to the ground.
Loretta was falling sideways toward me. I caught the ends of her long hair and wrapped it around my hand, jerking her head around and her body hard to the ground, my eyes fixed on Ric, still standing.
What had she done?
Ric held out his left arm, dazed by blood-river red coloring the inside of his pale jacket sleeve, the outside of the pale suit coat.
By then my boot was pinning Loretta’s all-too-solid flesh, her bow-holding wrist, to the stony ground and the silver familiar was binding that same wrist to the empty half of the handcuffs I now wore. Despite being down and immobile, Loretta was screeching with mad triumph, a banshee announcing a fresh death.
I turned again to stare, horror-struck, at Ric.
He looked down cautiously, lifted his left arm farther out.
“I’m all right.” He sounded more surprised than I was by those words. “The arrow . . . must have skimmed between my arm and torso.” He pieced the action together as he continued speaking. “It burned like a meteor for a moment, but . . . it only nicked me.”
The silver familiar stretched itself into something resembling Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth to bind Loretta’s arms tight to her chest.
Ric, no longer startled, spun to grab the rabid Cicereau by the hackles of fur above his sweat suit. He pushed the half-turned mob boss to the ground again. Then he seized the only weapons available, the arrows from the quill of the fallen centaur, now lying on its side in a tangle of hooved legs, weakened by long gashes in its equine shoulder.
“My aim was true,” Loretta shouted, squirming to work her bare legs around to kick me. “And the next arrow would have skewered you,” she told me.
Owie! Irma yelped.
“Not saving the first round for your hated father?” I asked.
She glared at the angry, bloodied half-were. “I want him to suffer longer. I can torment him anytime. You two I want out of my life. Now!”
“You came after us, babe,” Ric reminded her. “How?” he turned to ask me.
“She caught me on the wrong side of the mirror. A lot of that territory is laced with ancient and abandoned fey paths.”
“She’s not fey,” a hoarse voice declared.
Ric and I looked toward the centaur’s pain-wracked face. It remained mute.
The voice came from the ground, all right, but the speaker was the wolfman visage of Cesar Cicereau crawling to get face-to-face with the daughter he’d had killed, who’d come back as a ghost to haunt him and his hotel.
Anyone expecting a feud to be settled or a tender reconciliation didn’t know Vegas and didn’t know mobster werewolf families. They gave dysfunction a good name.
Ric and I stepped back, relieved one Cicereau was hog-tied with silver and the other was caught in transition.
“Why the centaur?” I asked Ric in a whisper.
“According to Dante, they’re the bullying guards on the Murder level. They have chronic anger-control issues and shoot arrows into the passing flood of murderers to make sure they’re in constant torment.”
I could feel my features wincing. Sadistic horses just weren’t in my worldview. Even now I fretted about the wounded horse part.
At our feet, Cesar and Loretta were almost snout to nose and both were showing their teeth. A crimson foam seethed between Cesar’s fangs. Loretta still looked girl-gone-rabid-rabbit.
“How’d you get me to this hellhole, daughter?” he growled at her.
“It’s for murderers,” she snarled back. “You are one. I just had to wait for your errand girl to get near any fey paths and I could send any of you where you deserved to be. And I’m not your daughter. I’m a fey changeling now. They get my ghost serving eternally at the Dread Queen’s court and I get revenge on everyone who ever hurt me and Krzysztof when we were young and in love.”
“Krzysztof was a vampire. He was never young. He was hundreds of years old,” Cicereau spat, spraying Loretta’s furious face with blood drops. “He was an inappropriate suitor.”
She didn’t even blink. “You never cared what anyone did, just that it suited your purpose. You wanted to humiliate the vampire faction and take over Vegas when it was just a sandpit in the dirt road.”
“I did care! I wasn’t going to have any mixed-super couples in my ‘Family.’ Crime lord lore is full of treacherous son-in-laws and take-over operations.”
Meanwhile, the silver familiar had